Systematic Analysis of Professional and College Team Sports and Players

Monday, December 29, 2014

NFL Competitive Balance 2014

Now that the NFL regular season is wrapped up, it is time to take a look
at how competitively balanced the NFL was last season. In order to do
this, I am going to look at the NFL season statistically as a sample and
as a population - mainly for comparison purposes. Additionally, I will
take a look at the conferences separately in terms of competitive
balance. The data comes from profootball-reference.com.

For the NFL in 2014 the Noll-Scully was 1.562 (population) and 1.587
(sample). If you click on the link in the last sentence above, you will
notice that the NFL's competitive balance for this past season is very
similar to recent seasons.

Since the 2000 NFL season, competitive balance in the NFL has been fairly stable as shown below: